Thursday, 16 January 2014

Building A Better You - Lessons With "The Professor"

Immediate apologies to players who are here to learn about a certain Shaper Identity - that's not what this is about. Instead, in a rare
moment of ego I decided to Google myself earlier today (come on, we’ve all done
it).Specifically I decided to Google
“Sutcliffe Sligh”, which was a Magic: The Gathering deck I designed about 15 years
ago and which a friend of mine played to become the first UK player to win a
major Magic tournament, crushing the then-vincible Kai Budde in the final of
Grand Prix Birmingham.The first link
that Google threw up was an article written by that very friend after he went
on to carve out a successful spot as a writer for StarcityGames.com.

The
article saw my friend summing up his Magic career, which had taken him from the
kitchen table to Grand Prix wins, Pro Tour finals and World Championship
appearances. It was a series of
recollections but each memory was also a lesson that he had learned along the
way to becoming both a better player and a better deck designer.

Although
it was written several years before Android: Netrunner even existed, and
written about a different game, many of the lessons apply just as well to competitive Netrunner as they ever did to competitive Magic and are well worth a revision session
today.

This is well-timed for Netrunner because we've recently had major announcements about the structure of Store Championships and Regional Championships - the building blocks towards the National and World Championships. Taking Netrunner seriously is not for everyone, and the same is true of Magic players, but with some premier tournaments on the horizon things are going to get a little more serious. If you want to be a more successful player or deck designer it’s a good time to go back to
college and learn from "The Professor".

No, not that Professor, THIS Professor… Craig 'Prof' Jones - the most successful UK Magic player ever to come from our sceptered isle.

You can find the whole of Craig's original article here. Magic players may understand what he’s talking about a little more than those who’ve never tapped a Basic Land in anger, but for the rest of you I will pull together the most important lessons in Netrunner speak as best I can.

PROF ON DECKBUILDING

“When you’re used to building your own decks it’s easy to get too
attached.”

This is a lesson that I think we can all
learn from and if anything it applies even more to Netrunner than it does to
Magic because fewer people pick up ‘netdecks’ off the internet than they do in
Magic. Most of the time you set off to
build a deck with a great dream of what it’s going to do (I don’t think many
people deliberately set out to make a crappy deck) and as you go through the
process of building, playtesting, rebuilding, playtesting again, rebuilding
again (you get the drift) it’s only natural that you will get attached to what
you’ve made.

It’s really easy become emotionally invested
in your deck and that can just as easily blinker you to its shortcomings. Partly this is because you like the idea
behind it – that’s why you started making it, remember? – but also because
through all the various iterations and refinements you know that your deck has got better.
Those 45 or 49 cards in your hand right now are the best they’ve ever
been. Sure it didn’t work last time but
your deck is better now. Right?

Nobody sets out to make a crappy deck, and
actually in Netrunner not many truly crappy decks DO get made. But an awful lot of get made that aren’t as
good as the best decks. That's not a terrible thing but it IS going to hold you back when you get to a tournament. The moment when
you recognise that the deck you’ve lovingly nurtured for three months has got
better but isn’t going to be good enough is a key one, but it’s not always easy
to have that perspective on your own creations.

One a personal note this is definitely
something that I’ve struggled with in Netrunner. I’ve done it twice, spending months refining
Chaos Theory builds then jumped from Chaos Theory into Rielle ‘Kit’ Peddler and
spending months fiddling around with Cyber Cypher builds and Gordian Blade
builds. Always improving, always
refining, always enjoying exploring the card pool in doing so… in the end I
realised they were never going to be the best deck I could play. They're always going to be there for me to dip back to when I want some fun, but I won't be taking them to tournaments in the near future.

“All too often people make the mistake of thinking what their deckcando is what their deck willdo“

This is
HUGE. If every deck starts out with a
great dream of what you want to happen it will almost always be a dream of
something that is possible, but not
necessarily something that is likely.

The
example Craig referred to in his article was one that I remember well because I
can still picture the hotel room we shared at Pro Tour Rome where he unveiled
his deck’s grand plan, and I can still picture the look of incredulity that
must have been plastered across my face as he did so. Craig’s deck was all about the best case
scenario – if things went the way he wanted them to go then he would obliterate
his opponent. Unfortunately if they
didn’t go the way he wanted then his hugely unconventional and risky plan would
collapse in a laughable pile and he had left plenty of opportunities for it to
go wrong.

This is
one of the key dangers of getting too attached to your deck (see the first
lesson) and it’s one that I think is very relevant in Netrunner, especially for
Runner decks. Corporation decks tend to
come with a bit of a straitjacket that ensures they can’t go too far wrong –
you’ll need X Agendas, and Y Ice, and probably Z economy cards. Runner decks are more freeform and players
have much more opportunity to screw them up by assuming they’ll draw the cards
they want when they want them. It takes
real mental discipline to recognise where you’ve drifted from the likely to the
possible but it’s a key skill you’ll need if you’re to maximise your chances of success.

If you’re
serious about winning as many games as possible then consistency is VITAL. If you want to know why Andromeda is the best
deck then you can stop right here, because this is the reason. Kate McCaffrey may be able to make a better
rig, Reina Roja may be able to shred the Corp with aggressive start and Keyhole
runs, Gabriel Santiago might play the same cards as Andromeda but have more
credits from HQ runs… but all those decks will randomly lose a certain
percentage of games simply because they drew the right cards in the wrong
order. With her huge opening hand
Andromeda is twice as unlikely to lose games to bad luck as any of her
competitors, and that’s a big deal.

So am I saying you can only play Andromeda because she has more cards? No!!! Please don’t take that away from this lesson. Instead take away that you should work really hard to play a deck that WILL do something, not a deck that MIGHT do something. Make sure you can recover from bad opening hands, make sure you can find your key cards, make sure you don’t need to see too many cards in a specific order. You might not draw them. You might get them trashed. You might lose them to some random Net damage you weren’t expecting. Hope for the best, fear the worst, but plan for the likely.

“If someone has a better deck
than yours, play it.”

Ultimately,
this is the brutal bottom line of playing to win. Build your own deck, tweak and refine it as
much as you can. Make it as consistent
and sensible as possible, take out all the wacky combos that you’d love to do
but you know deep down are just showing off.
And if, after you’ve done all that, you still have sufficient
perspective to be able to throw away all that hard work and play somebody else’s
deck… you’ve learnt the discipline to be a better player.

It’s
not easy. It’s often a bitter pill to
swallow but the best medicines usually taste like crap – that’s how you know
they’re medicine.

It’s
a lesson Craig learnt just in time. I
met his Survival of the Fittest deck at a PTQ and beat him with my Sligh deck,
even though he knew Sligh was a good matchup for him. A week later we met at another PTQ and Craig
had tweaked his deck to make it better against Sligh. I beat him again. Two weeks after that Craig won Grand Prix
Birmingham playing my Sligh deck. That’s
not an ego-rub for me, BTW because I’ve dumped designs of my own for better decks many,
many times. It’s what you need to do in order to maximise your chances of winning.

“Don’t forget the obvious deck.
Most of the time it wins.”

Obvious
deck is obvious. You know why it’s
obvious? Because a lot of people play
it. You know why they play it? Because it’s good.

Stealth + Elephant In The Room = Stealiphant

Playing
the obvious deck is often a dull and functional option.
It’s taking up all the creativity you can muster and flushing it down
the toilet. You won’t be the envy of
your friends and rivals. You won’t be
the internet poster boy for a brand new deck archetype. Strangers won’t stop you in the street to ask
for your decklist.But
you might win more games.“Boring
+ Efficient = Game Win” is a formula that holds true across a great many games. Desperado is pretty much the poster child for this - a console that gives you a credit is hardly an exciting use of 9 Influence, but it's how you get your Kate deck into the Finals of the World Championships.

PROF ON TEAMS

“Teams are important.”

Teams are something that don’t really seem to
be a big deal in Netrunner. Yet. With Store Championships and Regionals around
the corner that could well change – it’s often the bigger tournaments that are
the trigger for local rivals to team up to take on a common foe.

Teams don’t come naturally to players in CCGs
and LCGs, not least because most of the time you’re sitting at the table alone,
playing for you not your teammates. That
said, after 20 years in Magic: The Gathering, World of Warcraft and Netrunner I
can tell you without hesitation that pretty much all the best moments in those
20 years involved other people – friends and teammates. The nature of card games is that you’re going
to get unlucky sometimes, you’re going to lose sometimes, you’re going to get
bad hands or bad R&D accesses where the Runner scores 6 Agenda points with
their first two runs. Teams are a
support network. They’re there to help
you build your deck. They’re there to
watch you play and will you on.
They’re there to talk over your
decisions and help you play better in the future. Teams are great.

When the UK’s Store Championships were
announced earlier this week the first thing I asked was “who wants to team up
and take down as many of these things as possible?” and that so many of the
people who have been running my servers and trashing my programs were ready to
team up was great to see.

Turn opponents into teammates. It’s better that way.

“More people building a deck
together = good.”

Oh. Hell.
Yes.

More
ideas, more points of view, more contributions from past experiences. More playtesting, more decks played against,
more options tested – more rigorously and more reliably. When deckbuilding is a collaborative process
and not a lone exercise you can achieve more, in less time, and with a greater
chance of producing a result that is balanced against your likely opponents.

“What
would you do differently? Why? Ok I see that but I was worried about Card
X. Have you played against that much? Yeah, me either… maybe it’s not so important. Have you guys needed Card Y much, I keep
drawing it and it doesn’t seem to do much.
Oh it won a game for you? Cool,
maybe it’s worth keeping in.”

I know what it feels like to go into a tournament with a deck that I’ve built myself,
tested myself, and has only my thoughts and experiences behind it. I also know what it’s like to go into a
tournament with three teammates whose opinions I trust, and with whom I’ve
spent a month testing a deck, bouncing ideas around, and with whom we all agree
we’re packing the right deck. I’ve won
games with cards that I know wouldn’t have been in my deck if I’d been running
solo.

Teams
make your deck better.

“Most of the time you should go
with your team. Sometimes you have to recognise when to split with the herd”

It
doesn’t matter how good your teammates are and it doesn’t matter how convinced
they are that they’re right and you’re wrong, sometimes your Spidey Sense is
going to tingle anyway. If you just
can’t get on board with what everyone else is doing for some reason then don’t
be afraid to do your own thing. Sitting
there and playing a deck you don’t believe in will not improve your chances.

Why
will your Spidey Sense tingle? For a
whole host of reasons. Maybe you don’t
think it suits your playstyle – it’s too controlling and you want to be more
aggressive. Maybe you don’t agree with
your teammates about what decks you think everyone else is going to play. Maybe you just don’t like Gabriel Santiago’s
freaky metal arm. Teams are good – all
the playtesting and experiences and discussions you’ve had in coming to the
point where you play a different deck to them will still come in very useful in
the tournament – but being in team doesn’t mean you joined the Borg and signed over your free will.

PROF ON PLAYING

“Be prepared to own up to your
own bad plays rather than blaming poor luck.
Accept that some games are just out of your control, and you must be
able to put it aside and move onto to the next round.”

These
are two key skills. Unless you’re a
freak of probability math you’re going to lose games of any card game – that’s
the nature of drawing cards randomly from your deck - but recognising why you
lost those games and responding to those losses in the right way gives you the best
possible grounding for approaching the next game.

It
can be difficult to see your mistakes for what they are – you made the plays
you did for a reason and you (hopefully) had a logic behind them that you
believed in. Having the discipline to go back and challenge those decisions in
hindsight is one of the best tools you have to improving your chances going
forwards. It’s tempting to see the
Runner accessing an Agenda from the top of R&D to win the game as bad luck –
and no doubt luck played a part in what they accessed – but did you really do
everything that you could to minimise the opportunity to be unlucky? It’s not a straightforward question – did you
allow them to access easily as part of a calculated gamble to win the game? Did you really need to make that gamble?

Some
players are very good at spotting their own mistakes. I have a Magic playing friend who can
remember key decision points in games from several years ago, and he can tell
you whether the line of play he chose was correct or not. I don’t have that skill – once my mind is
made up on a course of action I can be quite stubborn about accepting I was
wrong. For players like me it just
becomes another reason why working in a team is so helpful. If I can’t spot the mistakes in my own play I
need other people to spot them for me.

The
flipside of that self-analysis is to be able to recognise and accept that
sometimes you can make all the right plays and have your opponent pull out a
lucky win despite your best efforts.
There’s no point carrying that baggage around with you for the rest of the day - there’s nothing to be
gained from loading extra importance onto the next game or from feeling as
though the gaming gods are conspiring against you. I’ve seen plenty of players go on ‘tilt’
after a bad game but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game where tilting actually
helped. You’re not a Jedi. You can’t channel your anger like a Sith
Lord and use it to hurt your next opponent, it will just get in the way of making good decisions.

Through
working coverage for Magic: The Gathering I’ve been privileged to meet many successful
players and talk about what the defining moments have been in their growth to
the Pro level of play. Time and again
the answer isn’t about cards, or decks, or plays… it’s psychological. Time and again the tipping point for great
players is when they stop worrying about whether they’re 1-0 down or 1-0 up in
the match, whether they’re 8-0 in tournament or a defeat away from being
knocked out, whether they’re playing for thousands and dollars or nothing at
all. Stop thinking about all that. Stop thinking about the last game or the next
game. Think about this game.

The
key to this lesson. Just because you
lose doesn’t mean you made a mistake.
Just because you won didn’t mean you played correctly. But if you make the correct plays every time
you’ll win far more than you’ll lose.

“There are bad beats and bad
drafts, but there are also escape opportunities for the alert…. you have to be able to spot where you can
create the opportunities to be lucky “

Don’t
ever accept defeat, look for the way out.
We’ve all had Corp hands that just seemed unwinnable – Agenda after
Agenda and no Ice. Some truly are
unwinnable, but some offer a glimmer of hope for those alert to it. Sometimes you’ve got to play for that 5%
chance of winning because the 95% play just prolongs the inevitable defeat –
you’ve got to make the crazy play that shouldn’t work because if you play
conservatively you’re just boxing yourself further into a corner.

This
boils down to being another psychological lesson: as soon as you start thinking
you’ve lost… you probably have. As your
game plan is disintegrating in front of you, as the Runner hits you with a
second Account Siphon and installs Same Old Thing it can be really tempting to
mentally throw in the towel and just go through the motions until you
lose. Draw cards, click for credits, try
to rez Ice… it’s what you should do, right?
But if doing all that is just setting up a drawn-out defeat then don’t
you need a Plan B?

Sometimes
you have to accept that Plan A is finished, and once that happens you’ve got to
improvise. What do you need to be true
in order for you to win this game? If it’s
that the top of your deck is economy and Power Shutdowns, that the Runner doesn’t
draw a Clone Chip and that none of your top 10 cards are Agendas then play as
though that’s true. However unlikely
your winning scenario is IT’S YOUR BEST CHANCE OF WINNING. There are no points for being a
well-disciplined loser, but plenty of points for the winner who gave himself
the chance to get lucky.

Craig’s
greatest moment in Magic was precisely this sort of situation. Faced with sure defeat in the semi final of
Pro Tour Honolulu, Craig was moments away from being knocked out by Olivier
Ruel in the deciding game. His deck of
aggressive creatures had been stopped dead – his gameplan called for him to
keep removing Ruel’s creatures and attacking as best he could but there was no
way through. Craig analysed that his
only possible chance for victory was to switch to the defensive, hope that his opponent
wouldn’t be able to attack with all his creatures, then hope that the top card
of his own deck was a certain card… Lightning Helix.

It
was a lot to ask, but Craig had worked out that if he did what his deck was ‘supposed
to do’ he could only stay alive long enough to lose a turn or two later. If he risked it all he could win now. It’s gone down as one of the most dramatic
moments in Magic history…

“Variance can work in your
favour.”

Being
lucky is essential. It might sound odd
to finish on this in an article about learning to play better but it’s true. I don’t think many tournaments are ever won
by a player who spent the whole day being unlucky, and in fact I think if every
tournament winner was truly honest with themselves they’d accept that there
were a couple of times when things definitely went their way – they hit R&D
twice and pulled two Astroscripts, or an opponent couldn’t draw a Barrier
breaker all game. That’s the nature of
card games: luck is a factor. The best
you can do is to play as well as you possibly can so that you’re at the top
table when the good luck is being handed out and hope you get a little bit more
of it than the other guys.

Everything
about being a good player comes down to minimising how much good luck you
need. Play the right deck, playtest it
enough to make the right decisions, work with other good players to incorporate
their feedback and knowledge, analyse your own play for mistakes and good
decisions, give yourself every chance to win every game. You do all that just to mean you only have to
be slightly lucky to win, not extremely lucky.
But at some point you’ll need the luck and if you don’t take any risks
you’re denying yourself the chance to be lucky.

Relying on your opponent making a mistake is usually a bad idea (assuming your opponent is actually good) but sometimes it will be your only chance. If you sit there and worry about everything he could have in hand, or unrezzed, you could avoid taking the very risks you needed to take to win the game.

You’re
going to be faced with a decision. Play
safe and probably finish 4th, or take a risk and finish 1st
or 8th. If you really want to win then at some point you have to risk defeat, and recognising those moments when they come along is one of the hardest things to get right. It's moments like those where you can get 5 of the best players around the table and never be able to get them to agree on whether the gamble was the right play or not. They're the difference makers.

About The Author

David Sutcliffe has over 20 years experience of competitive TCG, LCGs and Miniatures gaming since 2000 he has written for a number of outlets, including official strategy analysis and event coverage for Magic: The Gathering and the World of Warcraft TCG from World and Continental Championships, Pro Tours, Grand Prix and Darkmoon Faires.

In December 2015 he ended his long love affair with shuffling cardboard and switched to rolling dice instead. David has moved over to the X-Wing Miniatures Game to begin his new blog about that game: Stay On The Leader.